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House GOP revises strategy on government funding bill

Wednesday - 9/18/2013, 4:20am EDT

ANDREW TAYLOR
Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) -- House GOP leaders are looking to reverse course and agree to
tea party demands to try to use a vote this week on a must-pass temporary
government funding bill to block implementation of President Barack Obama's health
care law.

A GOP aide says the latest strategy, to be offered to rank-and-
file Republicans at a closed-door meeting on Wednesday, would be to link a "defund
Obamacare" provision to the stopgap funding bill and send it to the Senate. The
aide required anonymity to discuss the strategy because it has not been announced.

GOP aides said no final decision has been made -- "or will be made, until
House Republican members meet and talk tomorrow," Michael Steel, a spokesman for
House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said Tuesday.

The Senate would likely
strip out the health care provision and send it to the House, raising the
possibility of a confrontation that could lead to a partial government shutdown
after the Sept. 30 end of the budget year.

The earlier strategy, rejected
last week by angry conservatives, would have sent the measure to the Senate as two
bills to ensure the Democratic-controlled chamber would be able to ship the
spending measure straight to the White House and more easily avert a government
shutdown. The idea was to avoid a subsequent vote on a "clean" stopgap spending
bill in the House after Senate Democrats vote to strip the provision out. Stopgap
funding bills are typically routine, with neither House nor Senate looking to use
them to pick a fight.

The fear is that angry GOP conservatives might
withhold their votes rather than surrender to the Senate and its top Democrat,
Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada.

The idea of defunding Obama's health
care law has been a crusade of tea party conservatives such as Sen. Ted Cruz, R-
Texas, and outside groups like the Heritage Foundation. Conservatives are
frustrated that Republicans control only one chamber of Congress and have little
chance to enact their agenda over the opposition of Obama and Senate Democrats.

Conservatives want to take a must-pass bill hostage and add the assault on
the Affordable Care Act in an attempt to force Obama and congressional Democrats
to make concessions. GOP leaders have viewed the effort with skepticism since
Democrats would never go along and that Republicans are likely to get the blame if
the impasse leads to a partial government shutdown.

An impasse would leave
the government without funding authority to pay its workers, including the
military, or enter into new contracts until a bill is passed. But essential
programs like the military, air traffic control, food inspection, and disaster
relief and firefighting would continue to function since they're related to
protecting life and property. And so-called mandatory programs like Social
Security and Medicare, which are funded as if on autopilot, would also continue.

National parks would close, most passport applications could not be
processed, and the space program would mostly be put on hold, among other
hardships.

A top House Democrat, Steny Hoyer of Maryland, said Tuesday that
he would not support the stopgap funding bill under any circumstance since it
would fund programs at an annualized funding rate of $986 billion, a level
consistent with automatic, across-the-board spending cuts known as sequestration
that Democrats are trying to reverse.

But if the Democratic Senate goes
along with that funding level, as insiders have signaled, and if Obama endorses
the straightforward funding measure, House Democrats could likely be counted upon
to provide the votes. The question is whether GOP leaders would want to pass the
measure with help from Democrats, which Boehner did on several occasions earlier
this year to the consternation of conservatives.

Treasury Secretary Jacob
Lew said Tuesday that the GOP move is a nonstarter.

"The president's been
clear. I've been clear. Efforts to either defund or delay the Affordable Care Act
are unacceptable," Lew told the Economic Club of Washington. "That is not a path
towards something that can ultimately be signed into law."

The GOP aide
required anonymity because the strategy has not been announced.

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